Making Words activity mats are a great word work option for students of all ages. Kids can’t get enough of this simple word work activity. Not going to lie: I’m even pretty obsessed as an adult! Here’s what you need to know:
1. This is a hands-on, low prep activity.
As a teacher, this resource is easy peasy to prep! Just print and go. It’s really that simple. Even in the current day and age of COVID, Making Words provides fun, safe phonics practice. Each activity mat instructs students to cut their own strip of letters off from the top of their page and manipulate them on their desks to create new words. A chart is provided for students to record their words.
PRO TIP: Use a guillotine paper cutter to bulk cut the letters from the recording sheet with a straight edge BEFORE giving to students. This ensures all the activity mats handed back to you are the same size if you’re a neat freak like me.
2. Tactile learners can tap and talk.
Moving letters around on a desk will help struggling learners manipulate words. Finding word families while physically removing and replacing the onset from the rime makes the audible visible. Making words in this way reinforces phoneme discrimination. Students can tap and talk each letter sound out, practicing reading fluency. Speaking of reading:
3. Readers and writers grow with every word.
The interactive mat provides a creative way for students to practice spelling and vocabulary. For younger kids, recognizing the CVC word structure is essential. Students should understand every word in the English language has a vowel at its core. Older students can practice adding prefixes or suffixes to root words. This resource truly can be used to reinforce soooo much! Making Words teaches key skills necessary for decoding, a strategy that is most useful when reading unfamiliar words.
PRO TIP: Have students color-code their letters to better see word patterns. I usually tell my kids to lightly shade their vowels red and their consonants blue. This helps students utilize word patterns like CVC, CVCe, CVVC, etc. For multisyllabic words, color-coded letter tiles help with chunking sounds to segment open and closed syllables.
4. Fun and engaging all year long!
My Making Words activity mats on TeachersPayTeachers are designed to either work with a current book/novel being read in class or as a standalone activity. I find the activity mat adds a level of excitement and engagement with other coursework. The monthly mats for this resource include the letters for various global holidays, inviting classroom conversations on these multicultural celebrations.
Making Words is a fan favorite and staple in our literacy station rotations. Though the letters change with each mat, the directions remain the same. Because of this, students can get started in a meaningful center activity right away with little teacher help! This frees me up to work with small groups for intervention.
PRO TIP: Teach math? Easily adapt this activity! Assign numerical value to each letter. Have students add, subtract, multiply, or divide to find their word’s worth.
5. Who doesn’t love a little friendly competition?
Over a decade in education and it still makes me laugh how kids LIVE for recognition. Y’all. Students of all ages love a good game and Making Words can totally become one! I let my classes work on the same mat for an entire week. On Fridays, we crown a winning wordsmith.. that is, the person with the most words created.
Your rewards don’t have to be wild, either. For littles, a special sticker or pencil does the trick. For middles and beyond, stickers still work (surprisingly) but candy is where it’s at. I give my sixth-grade word nerds a fun-sized box of (yup, you guessed it) Nerds and a paper certificate. All bragging rights and glory are theirs until next week’s winner claims their fame!
Teacher Tested, Kid Approved!
Kids AND their educators are obsessed with Making Words activity mats. It’s easy to see why! Here are just a few tried and true teacher testimonies:
- Easy activity to pull together for the classroom! –Simerjit B.
- This worked excellent with my advanced group! We used it as one of four centers and they loved the challenge of the longer words. –Megan T.
- My kids really enjoyed this! –Jennifer H.
- Super age appropriate and helpful. –Megan S.
ACTIONABLE STEPS: For a free sample, download my Martin Luther King, Jr. mat! You can use this whenever you’d like, though I might suggest January for the MLK holiday or February for Black History Month. Use anytime and pair with a book on MLK as an extension activity. The choice is yours! How many words can YOU make? To purchase monthly or book-specific Making Words activity mats, visit my TpT store.
